


all those questions unasked

by gendernoncompliant



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon, Prompt Fill, Teenagers, Trans Character, just a couple of sad kids taking care of each other, trans man Nathan, vague reference to child abuse/neglect, very vaguely romo in that they're in love but don't understand it yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24548485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendernoncompliant/pseuds/gendernoncompliant
Summary: He watches the restless way Duke paces the shoreline. Duke’s bigger than this town, Nathan realizes. Better than it. He’s making himself small to fit inside of it.
Relationships: Duke Crocker/Nathan Wuornos
Comments: 10
Kudos: 25





	all those questions unasked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Parker_Haven_Wuornos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parker_Haven_Wuornos/gifts).



> *Title from "Battle Cries" by The Amazing Devil.
> 
> This started as a 300 word response to a prompt on tumblr that I posted ages ago, but it's been nagging at the back of my brain ever since so here's the extended version.

“Really, Duke?” An all too familiar voice chimes from the back corner of the classroom. “Detention? Again?”

Maybe today won’t suck so much after all.

Rolling his eyes, Duke drops his backpack onto the desk next to Nathan and slumps into the seat. “Pretty smug for a guy who’s also in detention.”

“Only my second one this year,” Nathan argues, barely managing to keep the grin off his face. Duke likes this side of Nathan—the one no one else ever seems to see. The teachers all think that just because Nathan’s quiet and keeps to himself, that makes him a model student. Duke knows better.

“It’s September,” he counters with a smug little grin.

Nathan shoves Duke’s desk with his foot hard enough to send it screeching a couple inches to the left. “Yeah, and how many detentions have you had?”

A wolfishly proud smile blooms on Duke’s face and he props his feet up on the desk, leaning back like a king in his castle. “Twelve.”

“Maybe you should try not to get caught, next time,” Nathan teases, twisting sideways in his chair to look at Duke.

Duke makes a face. Figures the _police chief’s kid_ would try to lecture him about the art of _getting away with crime_. “Easy for you to say,” Duke snorts. He reaches out to smack Nathan’s cheek in a taunting parody of an affectionate pat. “Nobody suspects that baby face of anything.”

Nathan startles into a laugh in spite of himself. “Oh, fuck you,” he drawls, but there’s no real heat to it.

Duke beams. It’s been a while since the two of them have really gotten to hang out. He can’t help but feel like some of that is his own fault. Once his mom finally packed up and left, Duke stumbled into a well of anger he didn’t recognize in himself. It flares at the worst and ugliest times—gets away from him, like the rope of an anchor he can’t lift, burning his hands the harder he holds onto it.

Nathan hadn’t liked that anger and Duke couldn’t blame him for it. They drifted a little. Things weren’t wrong but they weren’t right.

Duke’s missed him.

He raps his knuckles on Nathan’s desk. “Hey, when this bullshit’s over, you wanna go to the beach? I got some beer in my trunk.” He doesn’t mention _why_ he has the beer in his trunk: that he’s been selling it under the bleachers at lunchtime. Nathan would look at him different, if he knew.

Duke figures the chances of Nathan taking him up on it aren’t any better than 50/50, anyway, but what he doesn’t expect is the way Nathan turns inward—just a little. He glances down at his desk, shying away from that bright version of himself he was just a few seconds ago.

“I don’t know,” Nathan mumbles, “Dad’ll be pissed.”

Duke wants that other Nathan back—the one who isn’t afraid of anything. But they’ve done this song and dance enough times that he knows better than to go poking old wounds and asking questions neither of them want the answers to. Instead, he raises one shoulder in a calculatedly careless shrug.

“You got detention, dude. He’s gonna be pissed anyway. Might as well have some fun before he puts you on house arrest.”

So maybe it’s a kindness disguised in the shape of a challenge. It’s all the same, in the long run.

A cautious smile breaks through the nervousness of Nathan’s demeanor. “Yeah,” he concedes, stealing a glance at Duke. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

Duke feels a bolt of pride spark through him. Even when the teacher storms into the room and puts all of them to work, his mind is elsewhere: already on the beach. And having Nathan there, beside him—kicking less-than-subtly at his shins any time his thoughts wander too far—makes detention a lot less monotonous than usual.

Duke has plenty of people he’d call “friends”, but he doesn’t put much stock in the term. Nathan’s the first person, since Bill and Geoff, that Duke hasn’t felt like he had to put on some kind of act for.

It’s not always a good thing. Sometimes they clash in huge, fantastic ways—escalating to a scale that he never would get near with some of his other friends. But Duke would take a real fight over a fake smile any day.

It’s worth it, to be seen. To see someone, back.

(It’ll be years and years before Duke has the right words to put to the feeling. It’ll be years before he understands.)

* * *

The two of them have spent most of their lives caught in some combination of “friendly but not friends” and “friends but not friendly”. Every time they have some colossal fight, Nathan promises himself he’ll swear off Duke Crocker forever. He never makes good on that promise.

For all that he drives Nathan absolutely up the wall, Duke understands him in a way no one else has ever even tried to.

Nathan knows what people say about him behind his back. He was a freak in this town long before his stint without being able to feel.

The fact that Duke played a few bad jokes on him stopped mattering when Duke started standing up for him.

Out in the sand, under the sun, Nathan doesn’t care about the rocky parts. He pries a beer can free of the six pack between them and turns it over in his hands. “Where’d you get this, anyway?”

Duke tips into a smile that’s all trouble. “Five-finger discount,” he chimes proudly. Nathan laughs and shoves his shoulder. “What?” Duke counters, “Cheap beer tastes better when it’s free.”

Nathan takes a sip and makes a face, recoiling back to peer accusatorily at the label. “Not _that_ much better.”

“Okay, go steal your own beer, then.” Duke tries to wrestle the can out of Nathan’s grip, splashing it across the sand between them, until Nathan manages to shove him off with a laugh.

“Shut up,” Nathan laughs. He ignores the acrid taste and tips the can back, muscling through a few big gulps. He figures it’ll taste better when he’s tipsy. “Besides, it’s better than the crap Dad drinks, anyway.”

For some reason that Nathan doesn’t understand, the joke doesn’t quite land. There’s a moment of quiet where something shifts. Duke doesn’t look at him.

“Speaking of the chief,” Duke murmurs, purposefully light. He taps rhythmically along the side of his beer can. “He ever hit you?” Duke’s trying too hard to make it sound casual. But there’s something hard to the lines around his eyes, the way he stares out at the waves with a tense hunch to his shoulders, the way he waits—not quite breathing—for his answer. It gives him away.

Duke would call it a tell. Nathan just likes knowing what he’s thinking.

Nathan digs his heel into the sand, watching it shift and settle around him. “Nah,” he mumbles as he turns the beer around in his hands. “Never home, anyway.”

Something in Duke seems to relax, then: the change so small, Nathan thinks he might have imagined it.

“Probably better off,” Duke muses. The levity in his voice isn’t real; Nathan knows that much. Still—real or not—there’s a second where the joke floods Nathan with a rush of anger he doesn’t want or understand.

Some part of him still wants to defend Garland—not for the father he is, but for the father Nathan keeps wishing he would be.

“Yeah,” he admits, finally. He stares at the beer can, plucking mindlessly at the tab just so the sproing sound fills the quiet.

Nathan wants to ask about Simon. But they don’t talk about Simon. Not since the funeral.

“I’m getting out of here,” Duke says suddenly. He watches the water, arms propped up on his knees. He glances at Nathan over his shoulder; there’s a wildness in Dukes eyes that scares him as much as it excites him. That’s the thing about Duke Crocker. He makes bad ideas sound good. He makes Nathan want to follow him anywhere.

“Soon as we graduate, I’m gone,” Duke continues, hand carving through the air. “I wanna see the world.”

Nathan feels anxiety prickle up the backs of his arms. Duke makes it sound like an adventure, but Nathan can’t imagine a life different than this one, even if a part of him wants it in a way that almost hurts.

Duke knocks him from his thoughts, elbowing his side. “You should come with me, you know? Screw your dad. And the Rev. All of ‘em. Screw this whole town. We’ll get a boat and do whatever we want.”

Nathan laughs, then, shaking his head. “Like pirates,” he teases, expecting Duke to shy away from the joke.

Duke just doubles down. Grinning from ear to ear, he echoes, “Like pirates! Think about it. Anywhere we want. Anything we want. Just you, me, and the water.”

Deep down in Nathan’s chest, there’s this ache of a _tug_ that he can’t find the words for.

“I get seasick,” Nathan argues.

Duke waves a hand. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Long time ‘til graduation,” Nathan murmurs. He presses circles into the sand with the base of the beer can. “What if you change your mind?” When he dares to look up, he finds Duke staring back at him with an intensity that knocks the wind out of him just a little bit.

“I won’t,” Duke promises.

Shying away from the sincerity, Nathan jokes, “What if we get in a fight, out at sea, huh?”

Duke grins and shrugs.

“Then I’ll throw you overboard.”

Nathan bursts with startled laughter, shoving Duke sideways into the sand. “Not if I throw you over, first!”

Duke cackles, batting Nathan’s hands away from him and struggling back upright even when Nathan does his best to keep him down. “I’m the captain!” Duke argues through fits of giggles. “You can’t throw me over! That’s mutiny!”

Nathan tries to duck out of the way of Duke’s retaliating shove. “Who made you captain?” He laughs just before his back hits the sand. He feels tipsy and weightless. They’re drinking cheap, gas station beer but Nathan feels bubbly like champagne.

Duke makes a face at him, but it gets tangled up in the smile he can’t manage to hide. “It’s my boat, asshole.”

They come down from the laughter, deflating into soft, breathless giggles until they both go quiet. They hover in that moment.

Nathan doesn’t mean to ruin it.

“It doesn’t freak you out? Leaving?” Nathan asks, his voice soft.

Ever since he was little, his dad always talked about Haven like it was the only place on Earth that mattered. Like it was the only place he’d ever fit in.

If this was what it felt like to fit in, how was he supposed to survive being an outsider?

“Are you kidding?” Duke counters, staring down at him for a moment before letting him go and sitting up. Nathan misses the contact more than he’d care to admit. He misses the light behind Duke’s eyes and hates that his own clumsy question snuffed it out.

Duke gets to his feet, a new restlessness unearthed in him—the kind of feeling Nathan understands as much as he doesn’t. “Leaving’s all I ever think about.”

“It’s not that bad,” Nathan offers, weak and untrue. In spite of everything this town has done to him, Haven still feels like home. Nathan doesn’t know how to shake himself free of that, even if he wants to.

“Don’t you hate the way they talk to you?” Duke asks. He bends down to scoop up the dried-out husk of a sand dollar and hurls it back into the ocean. “Like you’re stupid?”

Nathan gets the feeling they aren’t talking about him. Not really.

Duke doesn’t look at him. He finds more shells to throw. “Doesn’t it drive you fucking crazy?”

Nathan curls around his knees and thinks about Garland—about the ever-moving goalpost of his approval.

“Yeah,” Nathan admits. He watches the restless way Duke paces the shoreline. Duke’s bigger than this town, Nathan realizes. Better than it. He’s making himself small to fit inside of it.

It’s a drunk, nonsensical thought, but it rings true all the same.

“You gonna prove them wrong?” Nathan asks.

Duke flares angry out of nowhere. He kicks a flurry of sand toward the water with a frustrated noise. “I don’t wanna care what they think!” He snaps, but the words come out desperate and fractured. He sinks to the sand, dropping heavy and loose-limbed—a puppet with cut strings. “I don’t wanna prove anything, I just—wanna _be_.”

The idea feels so foreign to Nathan, he isn’t even sure he understands exactly what it means. His whole life has been about proving something. Proving he was good enough to be the chief’s son. Proving he was more than just the chief’s son. Proving he was a son, at all.

They’re quiet for a moment. The waves rush in and out. Nathan watches Duke match his breathing to them.

“You’re not stupid,” Nathan offers softly.

Duke huffs a little sound that’s supposed to be a laugh, probably. He props his elbows on his knees. “Tell that to my D average.”

“You’re doing it on purpose.” They don’t talk about it. He probably shouldn’t be talking about it, now. But Nathan knows damn well that Duke’s not half as bad in school as he pretends to be. He’s seen how Duke picks up languages, the way he holds onto facts, how he talks his way out of trouble. “How come?”

“None of it matters,” Duke mumbles, but Nathan gets the feeling there’s something he’s not saying. He can’t tell if Duke wants him to leave it alone or wants him to push.

He doesn’t do either, and the moment passes—sent out with the tide.

After only a moment of quiet, Duke breaks the awkward silence by splashing sandy saltwater at him. He hides behind a smile when he teases, “Besides, we can’t all be nerds.”

Nathan laughs. The tension unspools from his chest and the gloom that settled around them disperses like it was never there at all.

“I’m not a nerd,” Nathan argues, tucking his smile behind his lifted knees. “I’m a pirate.”

Duke slings an arm around his shoulders. He’s warmer than the sun beating down on them. “Yeah,” he agrees, voice bright, “a pirate.”

(It’ll be years and years before Nathan has the right words to put to the feeling. It’ll be years before he understands.)


End file.
